The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  Then, at last, the fireworks were done, and the lights went out over the choppy, monster-infested sea. Queen Maisie hugged each of her friends and kissed them goodbye. And then she thanked each of the retainers and servants and cooks and washers of dishes, all of whom had come out to see the fireworks and celebrate their queen. She thanked each one by name, and she gave them each one of the shells she had gathered that day.

  Yes, Phin, she collected that many shells. They were small.

  No, Phin, the fog and the nightgown weren’t still in the basket. May I proceed?

  “Bedtime, Your Majesty, wouldn’t you say?” asked Lady Dorcas, her voice sugary as a boiled sweet, with the same hardness under its gloss.

  “Yes, Aunt,” said Queen Maisie, matching Lady Dorcas’s honey tone. And she hugged her auntie and kissed her cheek, and no one who saw the lady and the queen in that moment would have guessed that one was about to try to murder the other and that the intended victim knew it perfectly well.

  The queen went up to her bedroom and closed herself in. She had finally come up with a plan, and she wasted no time in setting it up. She took one of her unspoiled nightgowns, stuffed it full of bedclothes, and thumped the lot into the shape of a girl. Then she tucked it into her big four-poster bed, pulling her quilt right up to its chin. The hat made of wishing-bird feathers stood in for her own head, and partly covered by a pillow, it looked right convincing, especially after Queen Maisie had closed the bed-curtains and made it dark inside. Then she took the ruined nightgown with the stains and tears from where she had hidden it behind a potted plant, and put it on. It made her shudder a bit to do it, but a girl can’t let shudders get in the way of saving her own life, now, can she?

  Next, the queen doused all the lights in the room and opened up the doors to her balcony to let in the moonlight. Then, still dressed in her tattered nightgown with the bottle of fog clutched in her hands, she crept behind a tapestry by her bedroom door to let her eyes adjust to the dark and wait for what would happen next.

  The palace clocks chimed ten, then half-past, then eleven, then half-past that. And then came a new sound, but a familiar one: Queen Maisie’s door opening slowly. Then footsteps, also familiar, and just one set of them. Lady Dorcas had come to do the job herself.

  Queen Maisie waited until her aunt had crossed the room; then she slipped out from behind the tapestry just in time to see Lady Dorcas lean through the curtains. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump! Five thumps, to match the five tears in the ruined nightgown she wore. Just as Queen Maisie had guessed, her aunt had not looked too closely at the shape of the girl under the bedclothes. But she might check to be sure her knife had done its work before leaving, and that would spoil the effect. There was no time to hesitate.

  Queen Maisie uncorked the bottle of fog and poured some out at her feet, hiding the bottle in her nightgown pocket. (Another lesson, Miss Maisie: A girl always ought to have pockets in everything, even nightgowns.) And then, with the fog swirling about her like all the mystery of the underworld, Queen Maisie stepped forward in her bloodstained nightgown and spoke. “Why have you killed me, Aunt?” she demanded.

  Well. You may imagine for yourself how shocked Lady Dorcas was. She jumped back away from what she had taken to be the girl’s body in her bed and dropped the long, thin knife she’d been holding. At first she thought she’d made some sort of mistake, but then, of course, she saw the rips and the stains: five, to match the five blows she’d just delivered. Not to mention there was that fog pooling about Queen Maisie’s ankles. A right ghost she looked.

  And then the ghostly queen stepped forward again. “Five times you stabbed me, Aunt,” she said.

  And Lady Dorcas backed away, of course. “I . . . I didn’t!” she protested, the wicked liar.

  Queen Maisie took another step toward her, and the fog followed. “It was not hard to lie to the child-queen of this land when she was alive and there was nothing but sunshine,” she said in a singy sort of voice. “But now I am the Queen of Fog, and you will not lie to me again.”

  And she took another step. And Dorcas backed away faster this time, four steps that carried her right to the door to the balcony. “Your Majesty,” Lady Dorcas protested desperately, “forgive me.”

  “Five blows, and you dare to ask my forgiveness?” Queen Maisie took another step. “The Queen of Fog has not given you leave to speak. But I will give you a choice, since for many years I thought you loved me.”

  “What kind of choice?” Lady Dorcas barely got the words out, her teeth were chattering so hard.

  “The fog, or the sea,” said Queen Maisie.

  “I don’t understand,” Lady Dorcas managed.

  “Come with me into the fog”—and here the queen brought the fog swirling up between them with a flick of her wrist—“or take your chances in the sea.” And she pointed at the balcony behind her aunt. “The fog or the sea, Aunt. Which will it be?” And then, because, of course, only one of those choices would really do, Queen Maisie flicked her wrist again and sent the fog lunging obediently after her aunt.

  And that was all it took. Lady Dorcas screamed, turned, and leaped over the balcony rail.

  Now, had she jumped from any other balcony in the castle, she would’ve been dashed to death on the rocks. But Queen Maisie’s window was the only one that fell straightaway down into blue sea. Or at least, it might have been blue sea on any other night, when an hour of explosions in the sky had not driven the golevants into a frenzy that, hours later, still had not calmed.

  There was a splash, and then there were screams. Queen Maisie dropped into a chair by the window. She didn’t look. A girl should never hesitate about saving her own life, but that doesn’t mean she has to watch a hundred ravenous sea creatures tearing her assassin of an aunt to shreds if she doesn’t feel up to it. And Queen Maisie was exhausted. Before the screams died down, she was asleep, and the fog tucked itself right around her like a blanket, around that girl in her stained and tattered nightgown, and it wasn’t cold and clammy at all, but soft and woolly, like you’d imagine a cloud might be if you could pluck it down from the sky and use it for a pillow.

  They found her there in the morning, and of course at first, seeing the nightgown and the knife tossed where Lady Dorcas had dropped it, and that fog still swirling about like mystery, the queen’s lady’s maid thought her mistress had been murdered in her chair. But then Queen Maisie opened her eyes and stretched, and it was as if she’d come back from the dead right there before her maid’s eyes.

  And I can tell you that the fog stayed and followed her like a train from that day forward. She was in many ways the same kind, sweet, good queen she had always been, but she would never again be a girl no one had tried to kill. Still, she knew she was strong, and she knew she was brave, and she knew she was clever, and on days when the memory of that night came back, she reminded herself of all the things she was, until she was not afraid anymore.

  From that day on, her people, when they weren’t calling her a miracle, called her by the name she had given herself on that fateful night: they called her the Queen of Fog.

  There. Not the story I meant to tell, but perhaps . . .

  Did you?

  Did you really?

  Well, then I’m very pleased to have told it, even if it wasn’t what I’d planned.

  Shall I get you another cup of chocolate, miss?

  INTERLUDE

  Maisie accepted her refilled cup of chocolate and turned, satisfied, back to the castle of cards. Tesserian handed her the queen of caskets and the queen of knots.

  In the corner rocking chair, where she had been sitting nearly motionless, her body silently enfolded in her mass of wraps, Madame Grisaille stirred. The shifting satin might as well have been a soft voice whispering Shhh. The room fell utterly silent.

  “That was a good tale,” Madame said, her voice thrumming. “I think, although it was not the story you wanted to tell, Mrs. Haypotten, you did well. As did you,” she said, smilin
g and taking one of her thin dark hands from the white fur muff to gesture briefly at Sorcha. “And now I will try to do as well.” She looked thoughtfully at the folklorist in his chair before the fire. “I do not think you have heard this one, Mr. Amalgam; however, I suspect the masters Colophon might know it.” Her dark eyes turned toward the twins, lighting first on Reever, to Amalgam’s left, and then on Negret, by the display cabinet. “Please correct me if I get anything wrong. My memory occasionally suffers a touch of rust.”

  Reever grinned and Negret guffawed, and as she was appreciating the way the laugh lit up Negret Colophon’s face under his floppy hair, Sorcha blinked in surprise, noticing the glint of what looked like a second row of teeth behind the first.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she thought. Nobody has two sets of teeth.

  “Just a moment,” Captain Frost said, turning his glass. He hurried from the room, the windows rattled, and then his sharp, heavy footfalls returned. He settled himself into a chair between the sideboard and one of the river-facing windows. “Please continue, madam.”

  “Very well.”

  SIX

  The Roamer in the Nettles

  The Old Lady’s Tale

  Nettles grow taller over the place where a body is buried. Or so I am told. Despite what people believe about very old folk, I am an expert in neither death nor gar­dening.

  There was once a boy. I like the name from your story, Phin, so let us call this boy Pantin, too. Perhaps it’s even the same child. Who can say?

  Pantin lived in a house of red stone, beside a garden ringed by crumbling stone walls and full of nettles that grew taller than his own head. In fact, though it had been decades since the last oldster who knew the truth had passed, the garden beside Pantin’s house was no garden at all. It was a very old, very secret, very private cemetery; a cemetery that had been built for one grave alone. That grave had never had a marker of any kind, other than the garden that was planted above it and the nettles that quickly overcame everything.

  There are many such secret graves in Nagspeake. This one belonged to a hero. Most of them do.

  This man under the soil—or what was left of him—had not only been a hero; he had been what is sometimes called a roamer. It is difficult to convey the many, many things that word means, particularly since roamers come in all sorts. Most of them spend at least part of their lives in wandering, but not all; some were once human, but over long years and a life of uncanny experiences, they became something subtly different; others had never been human for even a moment. Some do great things with their time, which can be very long indeed. Others walk and watch. To an outside observer, some would seem to be heroes, like the man under the nettles, and others villains. But all of them have at least a whiff of the otherworldly about them.

  This particular man, our roamer-hero, had been buried clutching a box. I don’t know what was in it. I never opened it. But the box itself was a thing of artistry, the kind of box meant to hold miracles, or magic, or perhaps even a single miraculous, magical memory. It’s important to know, at the outset, that the box was there, in the dirt and the decay beneath the nettles. But Pantin didn’t know it; he hadn’t so much as an inkling that the grave itself was there, much less that in the grave—or what was left of it—the bones of a hero held a maybe-miraculous box.

  The thief didn’t know it either—not at first. But that’s getting a bit ahead of the story.

  Another thing they say—those mysterious voices that say things that get retold in tales like this—they say that iron behaves badly in a graveyard. And of course, when they say this, they mean not just any iron, but the old, wild kind, the sort that can change its shape when you’re not looking. The kind that, sometimes, at sunset, doesn’t care whether you’re looking or not. In those moments, if you are looking, you can see the old iron dance in the last warmth of the day. But of course, you’ve all seen that before. Except possibly Mr. Tesserian—you’re not from Nagspeake, are you?

  No, I thought not. Anyhow.

  They say that old iron behaves badly in the gardens of the dead. I think the truth is more complicated. Still, it is true, at least, that Nagspeake does not build graveyards where old iron is to be found in abundance. However, people looking to hide graves do not always have options for where to put them. The hero’s grave wasn’t in a place that spilled over with old iron, like the Quayside Harbors, or Shantytown, but the iron was there, for eyes that knew how to look for it. Pantin’s red house stood at the edge of a wood, and the wood was peppered throughout with lampposts and lanterns in places where there was not so much as a trail needing light. Sometimes, in the evenings, the lamps and lanterns would open up and let their lights out to roam like feral creatures. Some nights, the woods were thick with wandering will-o’-the-wisps.

  Pantin and his neighbors called them bonelights. I do not think they ever learned where they came from. But you, Maisie—I would like you to know that, should you ever find yourself lost in the woods, and should you encounter one of those lights, you may say to it, “You once showed a lost boy back to the road. Would you please help me find my way?” For the lights did once help Pantin when he was very lost in the woods, though that is a different tale.

  Yes, there was a good deal of iron in the woods. Even the red house was not entirely empty of it. The house was tall and narrow, of a sort that would’ve looked much more at home in a town than at the edge of a wood. Perhaps there had been a bit of town there once. Or perhaps, Pantin sometimes thought, the town was coming, and his house had simply gotten there first. It had old iron in its walls and its foundations, and there was an iron rain gutter that ran all the way around the roof, with a spout at the corner nearest Pantin’s own window. That corner also had an iron gargoyle that changed its shape every few nights. Ever since he had been very, very small—much smaller than you, Maisie—Pantin had thought of it as his particular friend and confidant.

  Which is another thing you might do well to remember, Maisie. Old iron listens when you speak to it. Old iron hears.

  Three families lived in the house. On the first floor was the old man who played a guitar and lived with a dog named Joy; on the second, a mother and her twin daughters, Poppy and Tulip; and on the top floor, Pantin and his parents. And, of course, beside the house was that very old, very crumbly wall with its garden full of very tall nettles.

  One day, a thief came.

  He came first, as they so often do, in the guise of—oh, dear, I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Masseter, but I’m bound to say that he came to the door in the guise of a peddler. One rather like that Drogam Nerve in your story, Master Colophon, bearing books full of things that could be bought unseen and delivered later. I do seem to remember that this particular man had catalogs from a company called Morvengarde, though perhaps I’m mistaken. I imagine those names—Morvengarde and Drogam Nerve—look much the same on paper, and my eyes have never been sharp.

  I am trying to recall the name the thief used. It reminded me of mathematics, somehow. Trigonometry? No. Trigemine. That was it. Shocking blue eyes, he had. I recall that well. But now I’m losing the thread.

  The thief came to the front door and went up the stairs, knocking on the door to each flat. And at each door, when it was opened, he showed his books full of things to wish for. Then he explained that his job was not simply to sell, but also to buy.

  “To buy what?” the man with the dog asked.

  “Oh, all sorts of things,” the thief said. Trigemine’s master would pay good money for objects of value, and many things were more valuable than people realized.

  “How valuable?” asked the mother of the girls named after flowers. Her job did not pay well, I think, and she often came up a bit short of money.

  “Well, it depends on the object,” the thief replied, taking a single round brass jeweler’s loupe from his waistcoat pocket. How would it be if he had a look about, to find an example?

  “All right,” Pantin said curiously. He was alone in his family’s flat,
and he was certainly old enough to know one oughtn’t open the door to strangers, and I expect his parents gave him a good talking-to afterward. But he opened the door for the thief called Trigemine, and stood aside. The visitor put the glass into one eye and stepped in, already looking around, just as he had in the two flats below Pantin’s. And just as he had done in each of his previous stops, he paid particular attention to boxes.

  In Pantin’s apartment, there weren’t many. In the parlor, there was a group of three little trinket boxes Pantin’s mother had collected as a girl; in the kitchen, there was a box that held the sugar and a box that held comfits and a box that held patent pills. Trigemine barged right into the boy’s parents’ room without so much as a by-your-leave and spent a moment examining a music box that had belonged to Pantin’s grandmother. In Pantin’s own room, there was a small cigar box that had been repurposed to hold treasures. The thief gave that the longest look of all. But at last he set it back on the bedside table and sighed.

  “Nothing?” Pantin asked. “Nothing we have is worth anything?”